Good poems
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Eyes
© Charles Lamb
Eyes do not as jewels go
By the brightness and the show,
But the meanings which surround them,
And the sweetness shines around them.
Sleepy Hollow
© William Ellery Channing
No abbey's gloom, nor dark cathedral stoops,
No winding torches paint the midnight air;
Here the green pines delight, the aspen droops
Along the modest pathways, and those fair
Pale asters of the season spread their plumes
Around this field, fit garden for our tombs.
Madeline. A Domestic Tale
© Felicia Dorothea Hemans
My child, my child, thou leav'st me!âI shall hear
The gentle voice no more that blest mine ear
Retreat
© John Fuller
I should like to live in a sunny town like this
Where every afternoon is half-day closing
And I would wait at the terminal for the one train
Of the day, pacing the platform, and no one arriving.
Fragments Of A Lost Gnostic Poem Of The Twelfth Century
© Herman Melville
Found a family, build a state,
The pledged event is still the same:
Matter in end will never abate
His ancient brutal claim.
The Song of a Prison
© Henry Lawson
Tis a song of the weary warders, whom prisoners call the screws
A class of men who I fancy would cleave to the Evening News.
They look after their treasures sadly. By the screw of their keys they are known,
And they screw them many times daily before they draw their own.
My mother’s body
© Marge Piercy
The dark socket of the year
the pit, the cave where the sun lies down
and threatens never to rise,
when despair descends softly as the snow
covering all paths and choking roads:
For Four Guilds: IV. The Bell-Ringers
© Gilbert Keith Chesterton
The angels are singing like birds in a tree
In the organ of good St. Cecily:
To Sir George Howland Beaumont, Bart From the South-West Coast Or Cumberland 1811
© William Wordsworth
FAR from our home by Grasmere's quiet Lake,
From the Vale's peace which all her fields partake,
Here on the bleakest point of Cumbria's shore
We sojourn stunned by Ocean's ceaseless roar;
Thanksgiving
© Bliss William Carman
I thank thee, Earth, for water good,
The sea's great bath of buoyant green
Or the cold mountain torrent's flood,
That I may keep this body clean.
The Affliction (I)
© George Herbert
When first thou didst entice to thee my heart,
I thought the service brave;
So many joys I writ down for my part,
Besides what I might have
Out of my stock of natural delights,
Augmented with thy gracious benefits.
The Mariner's Cave
© Jean Ingelow
Once on a time there walked a mariner,
That had been shipwrecked;-on a lonely shore,
And the green water made a restless stir,
And a great flock of mews sped on before.
He had nor food nor shelter, for the tide
Rose on the one, and cliffs on the other side.
Here let us live and spend away our lives
© William Ellery Channing
"Here let us live and spend away our lives,"
Said once Fortunio, "while below, absorbed,
from The Shepheardes Calender: April
© Edmund Spenser
THENOT & HOBBINOLL
Tell me good Hobbinoll, what garres thee greete?
What? hath some Wolfe thy tender Lambes ytorne?
Or is thy Bagpype broke, that soundes so sweete?
Or art thou of thy loved lasse forlorne?
Creole
© Robert Pinsky
I’m tired of the gods, I’m pious about the ancestors: afloat
In the wake widening behind me in time, the restive devisers.
